From Life To Art In To The Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse, since its publication in 1930s, has been studied from varied theoretical perspectives. In Britain and America, the majority of critics prior to the 1970s approached it principally as a modernist aesthetic work, largely in terms of its narrative techniques and form, while in the last thirty years it has been the subject of psychoanalytic and deconstructionist criticisms. In China, To the Lighthouse is equally favoured, but criticism tends to concentrate on its writing techniques, and many essays attempt to provide a feminist or deconstructionist interpretation.It can be clearly seen in most criticism that Woolf's life has been probed in recent years as rich ground for psychological inquiry and feminist pathbreaking. Yet little attention has been paid to Woolf' s intense preoccupation with the relationship between life and art. The thesis intends to connect life and art, exploring how Woolf transmutes her personal experience into a great work.The thesis is organized in three parts. In Chapter I, Woolf's diaries, letters and essays will be used to reveal the extent to which To the Lighthouse has its origins in autobiographical materials. Chapter II focuses on Woolf s thoughts on modern fiction, which frame the way she depersonalizes what could be regarded as an autobiography. Questioning the very definition of "reality" narrowly understood by realistic novelists who preoccupy themselves with the external aspects of life, Woolf, among other modern artists in the first half of 20~th century, places emphasis on the inner reality, which makes invalid the conventional writing tools, such as plots and linear narrative. In place of the conventional methods, Woolf experiments with scene making, symbol making and simultaneity of things to elevate her life experiences to the plane of universal meaning. Chapter III, divided into three sections, analyzes in detail and depth how Woolf, as a mature artist, achieves depersonalization with the above-mentioned aesthetic methods. Her artistic method starts with her selection and alteration of life materials. Then whatever life facts she chooses as her materials, she intentionally tints them with ambiguity and abstraction through symbol making, detaching her personal emotions from the fiction and making it more accessible to a greater variety of readers. Furthermore, bits of the individual life are integrated into an organic whole through the highly symbolicstructure, which brings her work closer to the art of poetry. Finally, Woolf further detaches her self from her intimate memories and endows her past with new meaning by simultaneity of things. Such techniques as multiple points of view, parallel of two scenes and use of the characters as the observers of life are employed to compress the linear time into the present moment and achieve the effect of simultaneity.To mould life experience into art, therefore, Woolf has to surrender her own personality and extract the universal self from the everyday one. Without the process of depersonalisation, To the Lighthouse would just be the writer's self-pitying or narcissistic memoir of her own family. In addition, the depersonalisation process embodies and reinforces Woolfs beliefs about the art of modern fiction. The devices employed to transform life to art all prove to be useful in exploring the complexities of inner reality. With the perfection of the innovative devices in the novel, Woolf achieves her goal of art - conveying "this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit".